BLOG
UNLOCKING YOUR EVENT SUCCESS
While we love and excel at planning events, it is hard work. Oftentimes, it appears to be all fun and excitement. But as Murphy’s Law states “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong” and event planners are no strangers to Murphy’s Law.
JJPR has been honored to work on events that have involved renowned chefs, celebrities and award-winning entertainers, but the reality is that all events aren’t as glamorous as they may seem.
That’s why we put together a list of five things to consider when planning your next event, along with our just-released Event Planning Playbook to help break down your next event and ensure it’s a success.
1. MAKE A PLAN.
With events, failing to plan ensures a plan to fail.
The biggest pitfall when planning an event is the tendency to rush to the theme and decor, while overlooking the more important details like the purpose and goals.
Our team starts with a simple event management framework, found in our downloadable Event Planning Playbook, that helps lay out the answers to these and many other important aspects in order to ensure the event achieves objectives and maximizes our client’s return on investment.
This framework helps think through every detail of the event including:
• Purpose
• Activities
• Audience
• Approvals and permits
• Logistics
• Number of participants
• Event team (volunteers or paid staff)
• Budget
• Tasks
• Vendors/suppliers
• Registration
• Sponsorship
• Marketing
• Evaluation
2. PRIORITIZE PROMOTION
Marketing and publicizing your event is a critical component that shouldn’t be an afterthought.
When marketing an event, you want to make sure that you are thinking about ALL the details. Following are three essentials proven for a successful public relations and marketing plan for your event.
Set SMART goals for your event.
Consider your Return On Investment (ROI) from the beginning and create measurement tools post event. When developing goals for the event, ensure they are:
Specific
Measureable
Audience-Specific
Realistic
Timed
One of our clients, Children’s of Alabama, hosts a variety of events that we help coordinate, such as the Hooked on a Cure offshore fishing tournament and the Tee Off Fore a Cure golf tournament. We help set goals for these types of events, planning out how to incorporate social media, collateral materials, copywriting, media relations and event marketing tactics to achieve those goals. Check out examples of materials we developed for past Children’s events below:
Be creative.
For an event to be special, you often have to think of innovative and creative ways to transform your event, especially when working on a limited budget. One of the most exciting and fun parts of event planning is the creative development. Creating a theme for your event may sound easy, but done right, it’s no small task.
Our team collaborates on Pinterest, pinning ideas to event boards for inspiration to help set the tone for the event. Here are a few examples of the creative angles we’ve taken for past events.
Use multiple touchpoints.
A marketing approach that uses multiple channels for promotion is an effective way to spread the word about your event. To be successful, events need to be promoted across multiple channels to create a cohesive marketing approach.
First, determine the audience you will be targeting for your event and their communication preferences. Once you have determined which touchpoints resonate most with your audience, plan the promotional strategy that generates the highest amount of attendees. By communicating with your audience early and often leading up to your event, you will create top-of-mind awareness for your attendees, resulting in an optimal turnout for your event.
One of the best ways to grab attention and drive attendance, especially from the media, is with a creative media kit. Check out some of our past successful ideas:
3. STAY ON BUDGET AND ON TASK
You cannot start with no budget. Events are much like re-doing a kitchen. What materials you would like, tile, flooring and appliances are a starting point. A budget makes your choices real. A budget forces you to prioritize what is most important, what you decide to splurge on and where to save. Budgets provide guardrails and allowances for overages and determine the profitability of your event, both in money and effort.
No matter how big or small the budget, developing a comprehensive budget and corresponding tactics is critical for success to ensure you plan financially and mentally for every detail of your event.
A misconception about events is that you have to have a huge budget to have an amazing event. We have planned many great events on a shoestring budget, due to careful planning or finances where items yield the most return on investment.
Our Event Planning Playbook includes a sample budget and task list template to help you:
• Work through every detail of the budget, by category
• Assign areas of responsibility
• List talks within each area in the budget
• List due dates
• Note budget to actuals
• Track status of all details and any comments
4. MANAGE LOGISTICS AND THE TEAM
As an event planner, you are responsible for managing logistics including everything from vendors to volunteers to VIPs.
Planning for activities that will happen on event day is imperative, and the small details are the ones that will catch you by surprise. We utilize a number of tools to ensure all event activities our team or vendors are responsible for are planned down to the minute. A couple of these tools included a Load-In/Load-Out Schedule and a Run of Show.
The Load-In/Load-Out Schedule is essential for ensuring vendors, volunteers and sponsors arrive and that load-in items for the event are on time and in order, as well as to make sure that breakdown when the event is over runs smoothly.
In addition, preparing a Run of Show is important to ensure the event stays on time and that those involved, whether speakers, entertainers or others, are cued to help the event run smoothly.
Our Event Planning Playbook provides templates for both the Load-In/Load-Out Schedule and Run of Show.
5. MEASURE YOUR EVENT’S SUCCESS
Selling tickets and drawing a big crowd are certainly good measurements for evaluating the success of your event, though attendance is just one of many barometers. In fact, there are a lot of post-event questions you should be asking. What was the response from attendees – positive or negative? What type of media coverage did the event generate? Did the event cause sales growth?
You should have multiple evaluation methods in mind well before the event’s planning phase even begins. Look back at your objectives and see whether your stated goals were met.
Now that you know some of our trade secrets for successful event planning, up the ante on your event planning even more and download our Event Planning Playbook!
